


Disclosure and Intimacy (A Beginners' Guide)

by imperfectkreis



Category: Saints Row
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Het, Miscarriage, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 11:30:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2268096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperfectkreis/pseuds/imperfectkreis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>F!Boss is bad with social cues. She is, after all, a sociopath. But it's okay because she watched a lot of tv as a kid so she's learned to fake it. She's also got a habit of sleeping with her friends. So, predictably, when it turns out Johnny isn't dead, she has to do some explaining. And the fact she's been fucking around with Pierce is the least difficult of the things she's got to talk about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. She's gonna need a bigger notebook

Gill couldn't say she was particularly fond of Image as Designed. In fact, the place kind of haunted her. Half a lifetime of being teased about the crookedness of her nose or her barely-there tits could be supplemented by the surgeon's knife for a convenient flat fee. Yeah fucking right. This may have been only a sim, but if Zinyak had known her better, he would have restricted her just to the plush waiting room on the other side of the sliding glass doors, endlessly picking out changes she would make to herself.

Like she had done a dozen times before, she left without a change. She was the goddamn fucking boss of the fucking Third Street Saints. She was the fucking President of the United States of America. She was the motherfucker who was going to rip Zinyak's spinal cord out through his throat. She bought and sold tits, she didn't need them herself.

So her current cycle of self-doubt wasn't, strictly speaking, unprovoked. Today, CID was connecting her to Johnny's sim. It was the first time in over five years they were going to see each other, first in digital approximation, then, if everything went well, which it would, in the flesh.

A lot had happened in the intervening years. She'd become President, Shaundi had gotten (somehow) even hotter, Pierce had gotten stupider (not really). Hell, in the last six weeks since the earth had blown up, she put on five pounds of flab (no exercise outside of the sim and those fucking space rations she never felt full on so she just kept on downing them). Fuck it, it was impossible to think he would give a fuck about that. Johnny would undoubtedly be Johnny, ready to kick ass and blow a hole three times the size of earth through Zin heads. Good old Johnny.

She did take one last look at herself in the Planet Zin mirror, tightening her pigtails in the back, before leaving for the Broken Shillelagh. Fuck did she love killing shit. She unloaded both her pistols into a digital bystander, just for the sake of creating a little notoriety, before acknowledging CID.

/

Of fucking course. Johnny's nightmare wouldn't be a plane. On the plane he had succeeded in saving both her and Shaundi. Of fucking course his nightmare was racing towards Aisha and always losing.

Johnny Gat was a lot of things: sociopathic, violent, a little vain, confident to a fault. But ultimately, Gill always defined him by his bizarre adherence to chivalry. She had tried to beat it out of him, literally, but it never took, and it was always his fucking job to save a lady in need. Even if that involved blowing another lady's face off. That and all the damn door holding and paying for food even if it was only Freckle Bitch's. That's why he forced them to leave him behind on the plane. That's why his nightmare sim was about the woman he couldn't save.

There was a lump in the pit of Gill's stomach. She was going to have to tell him.

He didn't seem surprised at all at Gill's sudden appearance in the sim, then again, the antiquated side scroller graphics left few pixels free for expression animations and their speech was garbled. The boss had no choice but to play sidekick here. The other sims had ended only when victory conditions had been met. Only, in this case, Johnny would be returning to a reality without Eesh.

There was that awful feeling again. Whatever she and Johnny had been before the plane, whatever progress they had made in that…thing they were building together, years in this simulation would have torn down. Aisha would always be his girl, the one he chose rather than a second-choice option, yeah, fucking great. If this Aisha had been real, Gill would have thrown in the towel, like she had years ago when her youthful crush had so obviously already been taken. It was fucking worse losing to some fucking bullshit simulated memory. FUCK.

She hadn't particularly been paying attention to the action, instead mentally button mashing her way through the waves of oncoming enemies. Seemed to work well enough. Precision was clearly optional, unlike that fucking motorbike race against the clock to get Matt. The. Fucking. Worst.

The trip to Johnny and Aisha's house was all a bit of a blur, right up until the part where the Aisha sim got decapitated. Oh hell no. She was not playing through this repetitive bullshit from the start again.

"Kinzie, help me out here."

"Sure thing, boss."

Gill waited in the dark moment of silence as Kinzie reloaded the damn scene. Okay, Aisha resurrected, this time their arrival was a solid ten seconds earlier and Johnny went to fucking town on Jyunichi. Surely, had the graphics been better, he would have been a sight to behold. This way he was just kind of blurry. Okay, maybe Gill also needed glasses, but she wasn't going to tell any of these fuckers that. He was just so…big…everywhere. Instead she would have to imagine it in HD. Good thing she had an active imagination.

Helping him out didn't concern her in the slightest. Gill was certain that with the "too late" restriction overcome, Johnny would make short work of Jyunichi and the satisfaction of getting revenge himself would be far greater than her butting in.

Besides, when victory was won for sure, Gill wanted to excuse herself. It might not have technically been real…but over the last few weeks her experience with the simulation had left her questioning the lines between reality and not-reality in a way that made her head fucking hurt. The reunion of Johnny and Aisha was just too fucking intimate for her to observe. She turned her back to them and waited for Johnny to acknowledge her. When he did, she would have to explain. Everything.

"Boss," still that garbled lo-fi effect on his voice. "Let's get out of here."

"Wait for me, I'll come get you. You're going to wake up…sticky." She would have smirked, could she have.

/

Gill woke up on the Zin ship and refused to make eye contact with either Kinzie or Matt, both of who had come to meet her and presumably watched over her while inside. Pierce and Shuandi were still jacked into the virtual Steelport, running various jobs she had assigned them before going after Johnny. Both had protested, but she was the fucking boss.

"Let's go fuck up some Zin." Gill pumped her fist, legitimately excited to actually kill something tangible, rather than just scramble a bunch of numbers.

"Sure thing, boss," Kinzie started, "I've already set the course for the extraction point."

Matt nodded "I'll take one more diagnostic of the mech suit, just to be sure."

"Power armor!" Kinzie yelled.

Gill put one hand on each of Matt's shoulders, finally composed enough to look him in the eyes. "Guns, Matt, big guns, explosions, boom!"

"Er," he shook under her hands, "yes, ma'am." With that he darted down the stairs where they kept the mech suit like a scared deer.

"Fuck yeah!"

Kinzie high fived her. She knew there was a reason she liked this woman.

/

Gooy, sticky, naked, smelly Johnny didn't really lose any of his appeal. And how the fuck did he manage to keep his physique in five years of tube living and she couldn't even manage a few weeks? Those ration bars must have been pure fucking lard. He looked just as imposing in the flesh as she did encased in the mech suit.

Fuck she had missed this. She fired off another missile, causing a patch of Zin to explode all over the window of the mech. No guilt at all, just blasting through aliens. Not even that weird feeling she sometimes got where maybe regret was supposed to be but she was just hollow. She had always been just hollow there.

The trials of sociopathy.

The next thirty-five minutes consisted of corridors and aliens and carnage. A not insignificant part of herself wanted to ditch the mech and just start blasting through alien skulls with their own pistols. Maybe beat them to death with the severed arms of their own comrades. While she knew her kill count was higher than Johnny's, she wouldn't rub it in later. Besides, he was a naked man with a laser rifle and she was 5'11" of crazy in a four ton death robot. Oh, it was good to be fucking alive.

For every human on earth when Zinyak destroyed the planet she would murder 100 Zin. Even if that meant Kinzie and Matt would have to devise a way to make more Zin just so she could kill them.

The Zin were also particularly crushable. Their bones made very loud noises when they ended up under the feet of the mech suit. Crunch, crunch, crunch!

/

Johnny clearly got first dibs on the "shower" when they made it back to the ship.

Kinzie had set course back to their neutral position in the debris field that used to be earth. Gill passed the time looking out the giant window at the front of the ship. No one actually had to pilot the thing, so the cockpit was usually empty. Gill normally slept in here, though she found herself needing less and less sleep. Kinzie explained that while in the simulation they all entered quasi-sleep states, and they were technically resting while inside.

Shaundi and Pierce had returned from their missions sometime while she was out picking up Johnny. Neither of them had spoken to her, but everyone was waiting eagerly downstairs in the rec area for Johnny to appear. Gill just wanted a damn "shower" first. She smelled like ass and burnt plastic from the inside of that sweltering mech suit.

From the cockpit she could also monitor the locations of her crew. Johnny in the bathroom, everyone else, except Matt, waiting in the rec area. CID was still in his own private room. They had mutually decided it was best that CID get his own space. Gill knew full well why everyone thought that was a great idea. Clearly she was in no place to judge, although after the first time she decided that robot-sex wasn't really her bag.

Besides, not too long after that she had retrieved Pierce.

Gill buried her face in her hands. Fuck. Was she obliged to tell Johnny about that too? THAT was certainly just sex between friends. Which arguably was all she and Johnny had ever really been either. Only his fucking insistence on treating all women like fucking princesses made her feel really fucking attached when she shouldn't have. But then would Pierce bring it up? Or someone else? Only really Shuandi was in a position to know what had been going down five years ago.

The Matt icon paced the storage bay and the Johnny icon exited the bathroom and headed to the lower deck. Gill took that as her cue to go after her long awaited "shower."

She peeled off the Zin spacesuit and stepped into the dry shower. The white powder stood out against the deeper brown tone of her skin and it made her want a line or five real bad. If she could get fucked up she wouldn't care. She could be happy and violent and her very best version of normal. Withdrawal had been a bitch over that first week. Presumably some of her detox had actually occurred while she was in the pod.

After she had suitably covered herself in the cleaning powder she set about the tedious task of wiping it away, including from places it probably didn't belong in the first place…except actually that's probably exactly where it did belong. She hadn't bothered to put any of it into her dreads, but she did resituate her pigtails so they sat higher on her head.

Keith David had made her wear a "respectable hairstyle for a grown-ass adult woman" as a condition of his Vice Presidency. But, with no more earth, there was not more United States, which she was pretty sure meant no President of the United States of America, which she was pretty sure voided that fucking contract. That being said, she was never that good at geography, or politics….or cooking. Math though, she was good at math.

There was a pile of space suits in the corner, separated into male and female but not really by size. There were tiny ones for Kinzie and larger ones for the other three women on the ship. Shaundi and Asha couldn't really zip theirs up all the way. Gill didn't technically have that problem, but hey, she was a good imitator of a people person and liked to fit in, so she set the zipper low on her chest anyway.

Okay, it was time to face him. At least it would be surrounded by other people, so no chance of that being awkward. Right? She wouldn't have to spill her guts about certain things in such a public setting. So she could do this. This was cool.

Downstairs everyone was flocked around Johnny. Even Matt had taken a break from his little handheld video game to admire the charm that Johnny exuded. That was the thing about the both of them, her and Johnny, gosh darn-it, people liked them. She always assumed Johnny was a natural, that despite everything, all the murdering and shit, people wanted to be around him. For her, it was a carefully played part. She had cobbled together bits and pieces from movies and television shows. Writing down in a little diary as a girl how she was supposed to act around other people. It made her life infinitely easier, those little notes from other people's fantasies. Suddenly she didn't have to swallow those big, fat pills that stuck in her throat. And then she didn't need to see the psychologist who smelled like his 2pm whiskey anymore and asked her strange questions about her toys and why they ended up without any hair and their eyes burnt out. All of that stopped when she learned how to fake it. Then she didn't need the little diary anymore and she could just turn it off and on, how to be normal and how not to be normal.

Gill smiled to herself as Johnny related the story of how Zinyak had abducted him from the plane because he had been considered too great a threat to his eventual overthrow of the planet. Gill fucking beamed with pride over that shit. The Third Street Saints were not to be fucked with. She didn't even mind the jab from the room that that meant that Zinyak was more afraid of Johnny than he was of her. Okay, that maybe hurt her pride a little, but just a little.

It couldn't have been another twenty minutes before Johnny excused himself from the festivities, claiming that he was tired. If what Kinzie had told her was right, there was no way that he was actually sleepy. Although there was always the possibility that he had actually overexerted himself when she had come to extract him. She was so focused on tearing apart Zin that she hadn't considered the fact that Johnny might have been working himself a little too hard.

As he made to leave the room, he circled her thin wrist in those giant fucking hands of his and released it just as soon. Gill knew that meant well enough to follow him out.

She didn't bother to make an excuse for herself and simply followed him out after a few minutes. Other than Asha and Matt, these were people who knew her, and knew she could be erratic at times. Even Asha and Matt probably knew her a little bit by now, they were sharing close quarters. Whatever they attributed it to, it didn't matter.

Johnny wasn't upstairs by the sleeper pods so she detoured to the cockpit to check the crew radar thingie. He was back in the cargo hold. Alright then…well it wasn't as if there was really privacy anywhere on the ship.

She made her way into his general vicinity, although he could have already moved by the time she got there. In the end, she didn't have to look for long because that big hand was on her wrist again, pulling her behind a particularly large box.

Oh and fuck, was he on her. She was thrown back against the crate and Johnny's body was pressed against hers, pinning her down. He forgot about her wrist and instead his hands went for the zipper on the front of her suit, yanking it down and breaking the clasp. He literally growled in her ear.

"Gillian." Until this point he hadn't so much as hinted at her name. Not in front of other people. That had been the terms of her releasing her name to him those years ago. If too many people spoke it too often it would lose its magic.

Some distant part of her kind of cared that maybe they should talk for something about two seconds. There was at least one topic that required more than two seconds of talking. Gill wasn't entirely sure, maybe it wouldn't mean anything at all to him. But then his mouth was on her breast and she forgot all about caring about anything other than how hot his mouth was and the way that his fingers were working the other nipple.

She practically ripped the arms off of her spacesuit pulling it down and letting the upper half hang loosely around her hips. Her back scraped against the hard plastic of the canisters that made up the makeshift wall behind her, but she didn't really have fucks to give at this point. Her finely manicured hands (why the Zin had bottles of nail polish around the ship they didn't know, but she and Shaundi were grateful) worked Johnny's zipper down more slowly than he had attacked hers, teasing him and slowing their pace to a crawl.

His lips were on her fuller ones again, biting and kissing and pushing his tongue around a little like he had forgotten to be intimate. Those fucking huge hands covered both of her breasts and would occasionally tease the darker brown nipples until they became almost painfully hard. One of the first times they had done this, Gill could have sworn she could come from just those hands on her tits.

As much as she was pushed up against the boxes, she pushed back into him, pressing their groins together and making sure to apply friction to his erection. While she had intended to tease him, Gill was starting to lose control a little herself. Stripped to the waist from his space suit he looked just as good as he had five years ago. Like the man was cut out of fucking marble or some shit. Like those statues in the museum Kinzie politely told her not to fuck up. His lips were a little pink and his face was flushed when he pulled away from her face. Gill dipped her hands below the waistline of his suit and gave his cock a few short strokes, not nearly enough to bring him any sort of satisfaction. Still, he tolerated it and fucking growled again. Fuck did that make her hot.

Johnny dropped to his knees and started stripping the rest of her clothing, pulling off those heeled boots that she didn't much care for and rolling the stretchy space-material of her suit down over her hips and thighs. And honest to fucking God she didn't think that they were going to get this far again ever, much less today, so she had pretty practical underwear on. If she had fucking known she wouldn't have worn such dipshit underwear. But when Johnny pressed his mouth to her core she couldn't give a fuck about anything.

She reached down and pulled off his sunglasses, always hating the way his frames pressed against her lower abdomen when he did this. He always forgot though.

"Johnny," she moaned. A little plea for him to hurry up and get on with it. They had been relatively quiet up until this point and it wasn't like them. Even when they knew others were listening, normally they would be putting on a free show. Subtlety wasn't in their nature.

He hummed against her in between long, heavy licks against her clit. She thrashed a bit as she came closer to the edge, but the suit was still bunched up around her legs and she could barely stand as it was. Oh, that view of his paler face between her legs always fucking did her in.

He nudged her legs a little further apart with his knee, pushing them as far as they would go in the confines of the suit. Then two of those thick fingers were sliding into her, stretching her open as he continued to lick and suck at her clit. It was all so much and she threw her head back, smashing it into the shipping canister behind her and causing a terrible clash. Did she scream? She probably screamed.

She was still panting as he practically crawled back up her body. Tasting herself on his lips she greedily pushed her tongue into his mouth trying to drink everything about him in. They had been missing this for years. At least she had been. Maybe it hadn't felt as long for him. But if she had any worries about what life in the simulation had done to his feelings about Aisha, that was resolved. It didn't entirely resolve what they were. But it was enough to know that the casual sex thing at least was still on the table.

"Are you going to fuck me or what?" She smirked, finally kicking free of the space suit and standing naked in the cargo bay, other than her jewelry.

"Gotta make sure you're ready. You felt really tight."

His eyes were so warm, that kind of honey-brown that women just went mad for. Gill was convinced that was why he always kept them covered. They made him look like a normal person rather than some super-murdering freak. Truth was he was both. She had never bothered to hide her eyes for a similar reason. Hers were much darker, less inviting. They accurately reflected her reputation, to have eyes so dark they were nearly black, cold and distant.

"It's not like I was a nun or some shit while you were dead."

"I wasn't dead, Gill." He had pushed down the spacesuit further and freed his cock in the process. Yep, she had remembered this part. She kind of sort of wanted to stick it in her mouth, suck it down and make him squirm like he had done to her. But she actually wasn't that skilled in that set of actions and they were both clearly getting mildly impatient. So she would have to settle for him burying it inside of her. The sacrifices she made.

"No, but now I know Pierce isn't as impressive as he lets on."

Gill audibly gasped as Johnny sheathed himself inside of her. Even though she wasn't exactly petite, he lifted her off the ground easily and wrapped her long legs around his waist. She crossed her ankles behind his back and squeezed, pulling him even deeper inside of her.

"Oh fuck fuck fuck."

"I plan on it," he nipped against her exposed neck.

Johnny was frantic in his thrusts, pushing deep into her and only withdrawing enough to create friction between their bodies. He held her up against the crates like she weighed nothing and that was a heady feeling in and of itself. Johnny was a physical threat to her like few men were, and she fucking got off on that shit.

"Yes, Johnny, fuck me like that. I want your cock Johnny."

She knew how to push buttons too. Knew what Johnny liked, at least from her. At least in this situation.

"Tell me how good I am to you, Gill."

Even if their cries and moans were not exactly quiet, the words that passed between them were oddly private.

"The best, Johnny, your cock is the best. Ahh." She felt herself pulled tightly around him, stretching to accommodate him but still maintaining that delicious burn that she had missed, the one that the other men and women she had bedded in the last five years hadn't come close to replicating because it wasn't just about his cock in her, it was that this was Johnny and like hell was he fucking special. Even if the feeling wasn't mutual.

"Better than Pierce?" His voice was a mix of a growl and almost, almost detectable questioning. Like she actually had to answer the question. Like he actually worried. But that could have been her imagination. After all, she was piecing together emotional cues from studying sitcoms and daytime soaps.

"Jealous?" She was coy.

"Fuck right I'm jealous."

Somehow that was hot as all fuck. On Johnny's next stroke she came undone around him, looking into those too-human eyes that betrayed that his feelings were authentic, even if they weren't always the ones she expected or wanted.

This time she definitely screamed loud enough for the whole ship to hear. That was okay. Shaundi and Pierce could fill everyone else in on the details that they knew, providing that the rest of the crew hadn't worked things out already. They were a perceptive bunch for the most part….maybe not Matt.

Johnny's own pained/pleasured noise was muted against the side of her face, almost like a cry, or deep satisfaction. Maybe it had been a little of both.

He released her thighs and she slid them down the side of if body, collecting herself on the way down. It hadn't really registered with her that she slid all the way down to the cold metal floor. If the crew had any tact, they would spare them a few minutes more. Her whole body felt on fire. It was awesome.

Johnny slid his arms through the appropriate holes in his suit but left it unzipped. Gill idly thought about looking for her suit, it had gotten tossed somewhere, but for now the cool air against her skin felt great. He took a seat across from her, his own back now against another pile of crates labeled with mech suit ammunition.

"Shit that was good."

"Yeah, yeah it was, Johnny." Gill let her eyes drift closed, hoping that Johnny would introduce a conversation topic so that she didn't have to devise one on her own, or worse yet, tell him what she knew she had to.

She could feel his cum still inside her, some of it rolling down the curve of her sex.

"Are you going to keep fucking Pierce too?" He had located her space suit, and tossed it in Gill's general direction.

"No, no, Johnny. And besides, don't be too judgmental, I never let him stick it in. His dick is a perfectly acceptable size."

With that, Johnny had a fucking smug look on his face. He stood and gave her some privacy to get dressed. Well, fuck. She hadn't really made any progress, now had she?


	2. When had they gotten so old?

It had been four days since they got Johnny back. Block by block they were overtaking virtual Steelport and according the Kinzie and Matt, that meant they were weakening Zinyak in a more general way. Gill didn't know one way or another how it worked. She just knew she was having a fuck ton of fun. No matter what she destroyed, she could come back around in an hour and blow it up again and Kinzie would shout words of encouragement at her.

Yep, no doubt about it, she fucking loved Kinzie. Great, great girl.

She stood on the roof of the Three Count and admired the city below her. The air around her was unnaturally still. This Steelport had its own sort of beauty in the way it was an imperfect replica. Gill was proud of herself for noticing all the ways Zinyak's copy didn't live up to the original. A door that was the wrong color, or an intersection with the angles too sharp, the dip of a hill. It was little things like that which showed how inept Zinyak really was, how his hubris would be his undoing.

Her hubris, on the other hand, was pretty damn well founded.

Hopping down from the top of the Three Count, Gill casually walked into traffic, shooting off random rounds until the Zin finally appeared when she caused a car crash. One of those fiery red portals opened up and half a dozen Zin fell out before she took out the portal with her pistols. It flickered out of existence.

Two started advancing on her while the other four held back. Shooting off a freeze blast at the more distant pack of Zin, she turned her attention to the two in melee range. Gracefully she swept the legs out from underneath one of them, his ass hitting the pavement. The other she grabbed by the arm and flipped him over her shoulder before throwing her elbow down into his bony stomach. Zin were fucking tough, like made of hardened leather or some shit. But they broke all the same.

The Zin were uniform in size and pretty dense. It had taken some time to get used to the different center of gravity they had when compared to humans. It was a minor thing though. One center of gravity for men, one for women, and one for Zin, no big deal.

Did Zin have women? They had cocks, she knew because once she had made the mistake of putting on sandals before kicking one right in the crotch. Never again. The way it squished against her foot. Nope.

One Zin down and five to go. The one she had knocked over was getting to his feet again and she had another three seconds before the frozen ones would be active again, then another two seconds of cool down before she could use blast. Kinze was always working on reducing these stupid fucking cool down times. If she had fucking super powers she should be able to use them all the time, not these bullshit intervals. Lame, lame, fucking lame.

She punched the wobbly Zin twice in the face and he staggered backwards, his lips curling and showing those fucking awful teeth. The more distant pack thawed, but she couldn't do anything about them at the moment, just absorbing their bullets for now. The Zin she had been punching fell over and she smashed her boot in his face before moving on. Its virtual bones crunched under her heel.

Blast recharged, she set it off at the pack of five, who had stupidly remained bunched together, and unloaded her pistols in their general direction, only aiming in the loosest sense of the word. It just really wasn't necessary. A few shots and all five started shattering like glass, bits and pieces of fake Zin flying off in all directions. Some of the pieces scattered by her feet. They were so pretty like this. Had the crystal-Zin-bits-and-pieces been real, she might have tried to make a necklace out of them. Maybe she could ask Kinzie about it.

These fights were always over way too fast. If she wasn't actively causing mayhem, the Zin just kind of petered out before too long. They couldn't keep up with her anymore. Gill supposed that meant they were actually making progress. It wouldn't be too long now before they assaulted Zinyak in the flesh. She was sure as hell ready. Six weeks ago she was fucking ready too, but Kinzie assured her this was the best way to do it.

She holstered her pistols, which just caused them to disappear into this thing Matt called an "inventory." All these fucking weird restrictions. Shit felt real in here. Well, sometimes it did and sometimes it didn't. The pistols had weight in her hand when she held them, but her body itself felt lighter. It was a real fucking head trip.

Thinking about her PDA, it materialized in her hand and she called up Johnny.

"Hey man, carnage?" It was a simple question he would understand.

"Be right there," Johnny's voice was cheerful on the other end of the line.

It would be a couple of minutes before Johnny got jacked in to the system. Four days and she hadn't made any progress in telling him. They hadn't been ignoring each other or anything. Yesterday, when they had both been out of the sim, he had visited her in the cockpit and she rode him in the pilot's chair. He had gotten to seen her framed by a backdrop of stars and pieces of earth that floated around the ship. She had gotten to look him right in the eyes as he came. In that moment, he looked way younger. Fair trade-off.

Fuck, when had they gotten so old?

They fucked but they didn't talk, which was generally the way things went with them. Well, they did talk, they had long, extended conversations about the pros and cons of different weapons available to them in the sim. Johnny didn't care for the laser rifles one bit. Gill thought they were okay, but now that Kinzie had her sim tweaked the fuck out she took a special sadistic pleasure in killing things with the power of dubstep. Johnny could not be convinced of the fatal power of bass.

The first day Johnny was out, before they had gotten him his super powers, they actually had to ride together in a car and he made fun of her taste in music. He always did that. He made "wub-wub" noises over every electronic track just to tease her. Just to spite him, she crashed the Emu into an oncoming truck so he would go flying out the windshield. Side-effect; she went flying too and they ended up wrestling in the middle of traffic.

He hijacked another car for them and she smiled and called him a dickface. Like always, he held the door open for her as she took the driver's seat. After that, they rode in silence for awhile.

Yeah, they would go after Zinyak soon, and she wanted to tell him while they still had the simulation as an outlet for their frustrations. She didn't have a media example to emulate for this. Predicting what she should do, or what he was going to do, was really difficult.

Maybe she should cry? But he would see right through that, call her on her bullshit. It was hard knowing you were a monster. Not that hard, but a little.

She walked the sidewalk like all the other sims waiting for him. White-purple swirls of numbers created a little vortex next to her and in another moment Johnny was present.

"Kinzie, clock out for awhile." She used her boss voice, not the friend voice she had started using with the hacker over the last couple of years.

"But I slept 52 hours ago! There's nothing else to do," Kinzie's disembodied voice responded.

"Don't care, fuck off." She wished that she had a clever threat to level, but her mind was predictably elsewhere.

"Fine."

Gill had nothing but Kinzie's word that she had disconnected from observing her in the sim. Honestly, that was good enough. Maybe Kinzie knew already, girl knew fucking everything. Dropped the bombshell about knowing her name while she was otherwise occupied and Gill seriously considered shooting Kinzie's car instead of the Deckers'. Now she was glad she hadn't, but at the time she had been furious.

"What are we blowing up, Boss?" Johnny didn't suspect a fucking thing. Didn't have a reason to.

"Walk with me, Johnny." Gill kept her eyes straight ahead, thinking it would be easier to talk without the interference of Johnny's reactions. "We'll kill something soon, promise. You're gonna want to. Fuck." She covered her face with her hand.

"What is it?" Genuine concern. Sure, Johnny was sociopathic too, at least a little bit. Otherwise he wouldn't be able to sleep at night. But he didn't have it as bad as her. One of the things they had in common. But he didn't have the expression problems that had plagued her as a child. Normal things could make him happy; normal things could make him angry. He was going to be angry.

"Okay, I gotta talk you you gotta listen. Don't interrupt me or I won't get all the way through it." Gill wished she was wearing something with pockets so she'd have somewhere to stick her hands. Johnny laughed at her exasperation and crossed his arms over his chest as they continued walking.

"Arrrggg," Gill found it easier to scream nonsensical things rather that just get on with it.

"Was that it?" The smile on Johnny' lips was apparent in his voice.

"No, fuck this is hard."

"Nothing's ever hard for you, Boss." He was goading her.

"It is when you're involved," she pouted. What? Yeah, she could pout.

They walked in silence a bit longer, cars passing them in the opposite direction, flickering on occasion showing the seams of the sim. She was psyching herself out again, like she had been doing for four fucking days, like she would do forever if she could. Oh? Was that an option? No? Fuck.

"When you died..."

"I didn't die, I was abducted."

"What the fuck did I say about interruptions? You gonna tell me about your anal probe next?" Silence. Good, he knew better now.

"Shit, Johnny, you knocked me up, okay? And no interruptions, I know it was you because I'm only ever reckless with you." She kept walking even though Johnny stopped. Just keep walking. Nope, not following her, shit.

Gill turned on her heels and walked back towards him. Still rooted in place, he was unreadable behind his glasses. When she approached, he grabbed his arm and pulled her off the sidewalk and between two residential buildings. The alleyway was empty. That didn't matter, none of this was real, anyway.

"Don't look at me like that," really she meant don't look at her at all, because she wasn't good at telling what was going on under his glasses. Nah, even without the glasses she wouldn't know. He didn't interrupt, now she kind of wished she hadn't told him that.

"I was real fucked up after I thought you died. Nothing made me feel alive, I thought I was depressed. We were fucking up Steelport, the real Steelport, real bad. Just tearing shit up. At some point I took a couple of bullets that Shaundi couldn't patch on her own so I dragged my ass to the hospital. Sewed me up real good and did that routine bloodwork bullshit. Ta-da! Turns out I got a little parasite inside me. 'It would be for the best if you layed off the coffee and the cocaine, Jane Doe.'"

Johnny had a firm grip on her arms the whole time, as if afraid she was going to bolt. There would be bruises there if this were real. Maybe she was considering bolting, but there would be nowhere to run to. This was all fake and the only real thing was a too-close-quarters ship.

"What happened?"

Oh, that nearly fucking broke her. He was so sincere. He did care. That was the worst fucking scenario. She didn't care, not really, but she cared about him, what he thought of her. It was a habit she couldn't break even as she had overtaken him in the hierarchy; objective number one, be badass enough Johnny Gat would be proud.

"I didn't stop. I didn't stop with the caffeine or the drugs or the kicking shit out of people. I couldn't. You know I was addicted real bad to both. Er, all three. Or I just liked it too much. It seemed like the right thing, to keep going, hunt down Killbane and get his head. But I couldn't even do that. Fucking STAG forced my hand."

"And?"

"And? I should have just terminated it that same day. I ended up losing it later on. That's it. I don't think you need details about it, but I had to go back to the hospital."

The tension was disappearing from her muscles, but Johnny's grip hadn't changed.

"Did you care?" Thank fuck he still had his glasses on, because any hint of the look in his eyes and she would be well fucked.

"No, it was a relief." He'd hate her. He might not say it, but he would hate her, because he was never as far gone as she was. "Do you care?"

"You knew I would, that's why you told me." Good old Johnny, always seeing through her bullshit. It's what made him so dangerous. She'd be fucked if he ever turned on her. This might be that time. "You're manipulative."

"You'd say the same thing if I didn't tell you."

"Yeah." His started dissipating from the sim in a cloud and Gill was left alone in the alleyway. This was bad. She was expecting him to kick the shit out of her sim and then blow up some shit until he burnt himself out. None of that had happened and her only option was to hide in the sim a bit longer.

Kinzie came back on. "Do I even want to know what happened? Because Johnny is throwing crates at Miller right now. And his aim is pretty good. He's a fucking beast." Kinzie seemed giddy at the prospect of Matt getting crushed. The following crash was so loud that Gill could hear it from inside the sim. "You'd better come calm him down before we have to tranq him."

"We have tranqs?"

"Exactly," chipper, with just the right hint of menace.

Shit, everything was her fucking problem always. Right, this was definitely her problem. No one else to blame here.

Jacking out, she was confronted with various screams and crashes. She didn't stop for Kinzie and jumped over the railing down to the cargo bay. Shaundi was already there trying and failing to get Johnny to stop. Girl just never had the physical presence for that kind of shit.

"Cut this fuckery out, Johnny. This was why we were in the fucking sim!" She wasn't strong enough to stop him, but she could sure as hell slow him down. Gripping his arm in both her hands, she wrenched his arm, causing him to drop the canister he was about to hurl at Matt. "What the fuck are you even doing? Stop."

Johnny knew well enough that it was an order and not a request. Still, he was pissed as fuck. Freeing himself from Gill's grip, he stalked off, leaving the other crewmates behind, including a very traumatized Matt, who had curled up into a fetal position trying to protect his head. Smart kid.

Gill left them all slack-jawed in the cargo bay and went after Johnny. CID was wandering the upstairs corridor, so Johnny had probably kicked it out of the private room. This was shit she had to deal with now. At some point there was an option to handle this like an adult, but that time had long since passed.

There were no locks on any of the doors of the ship, so Gill just strolled on in. Blood was smeared on the opposite wall in little patches. Not a lot of it, not enough to worry, but Johnny had probably broken at least one of his hands smashing them against the unyielding surface. Maybe it helped him feel alive.

"What should I have done? You know I don't know how these things are supposed to go." It was an honest question.

Johnny laughed bitterly. "Delegate, let someone else fight while you sat back and got all fat. But you weren't going to do that, were you?"

"That's not what I meant."

"I know. I guess you did the right thing by telling me." Johnny's back was against the metal wall, his head tilted up at the ceiling. Still frozen just inside the doorway, Gill wasn't sure if it was appropriate to sit with him. Blood dribbled down his knuckles but stopped just short of reaching the floor.

"I couldn't let the Syndicate get away with what they did to you. What we thought they did," she corrected. It was an excuse she told herself frequently in the first year. After that, she didn't really think about it anymore. It was a non-issue until Johnny showed up again, something in the recesses of her memory.

He patted the space on the floor next to him. An invitation to join that she readily accepted. At least he was a little calmer now. Who knew how long that would last.

"You were never gonna be that woman who stopped, were you? Once you set your mind to something you're a fucking hurricane." While the opportunity was here, she soaked up his body heat, their shoulders just touching.

"We have that in common. It's why you'd always pick Aisha over me."

Johnny shook his head and she knew she was wrong for bringing Aisha up. Socially unacceptable in this moment between the two of them.

"It's in the past now." He took off his sunglasses and set them on the floor. Turning to her, Gill instinctively turned towards him. Those fucking eyes. Pretty, human. "I just gotta ask you one thing."

Gill nodded, but she wasn't sure she would be able to answer his question, no matter what it was.

"Are you capable of love?" Honest question from one of the only people she ever managed to give a fuck about.

After the medication and the therapy and the experimental treatments, after her media reprogramming, she could still feel something for him. Sitting here, side by side, it was so much more intimate than anything she had experienced in the last five years he was gone. Deep under the layers she had used to become barely passable in society, there was the faintest glimmer of something authentically her. She felt authentically her and authentically pained looking at him now, open, honest, and a little crazy too. Without that little bit crazy, he wouldn't have even bothered with her. But here they were, bothering each other. Yeah, she was capable.

"No." This lie was so much more merciful than the truth.

He smiled and pat her on the back as he stood up and left CIDs room. The robot floated back in and found Gill still on the floor.

"Are you in need of my services?" Its digital voice chimed. "Kinzie found a new attachment for my chassis." It sounded way too excited.

"No, no." She gathered herself up and went to jack back in, not bothering to take anyone else with her.

After their confrontation, she didn't expect Johnny to come to her again, for anything really. At first he didn't. A twenty-four hour period elapsed without their crossing paths. But space on the ship was tight. When they ran into each other in the kitchen, Johnny, to his credit didn't act any different. He smiled and flirted and pat her on the back as he left. Another twenty-four hour cycle and it was like the whole thing never happened.

She jacked out of the sim and he was on her right away. They kicked CID out of the private room again much to its displeasure. He felt fucking devine between her legs, fucking her until his knees were raw from kneeling on the metal floor. The rivets used to bolt the floor together scraped against her back as she slid with his thrusts, leaving little red, circular imprints on her flesh between the stylized feathers of her tattooed wings.

Even though she knew better, she took off his glasses so she could look at him as he came. It was always her favorite part. Other than the fucking. The actual fucking was good too. Johnny tended to come with his eyes open. She liked that.

Heat built up inside of her, right in the pit of her stomach and the base of her spine, sandwiching her. The friction between them was just perfect; the way his hip bones cut into her was particularly delicious.

She couldn't help but convulse around him, lifting her hips erratically towards him, trying to hold on to every inch of pleasure she could reach. Then he was chasing after her, pounding her into the floor, looking for somewhere deeper to go. The muscles in his abdomen twitched and he flooded her. This was what had caused the problem in the first place, but they were still too stupid for each other, despite everything.

Johnny climbed off of her, panting hard. Maybe the years in the tank had been harder on him than he had let on at first. She smiled, she liked seeing him frazzled. She liked seeing him any way she could.

"Times like this, I really miss cigarettes," he laughed like it was a real great joke.

"Fuck, do you know, first day on the ship, I seriously considered trying a line of that powder from the showers, just to see what would happen."

He eyed her suspiciously, "You didn't."

"No, I'm actually not that much of a problem that I would snort weird hostile alien soap solution. Give me some credit." She rolled her eyes.

"Well, I'll see you later, Gillian." Before leaving he kissed her sweetly on the forehead, like this was the most normal thing in the world, like the last five years had never happened.

It was all Gill could have ever asked for from him.


End file.
